Introduction

After setting out the broader arguments and structure of the book, this introduction goes on to discuss the historiographical context and theoretical innovations on which the study builds. It uses two examples—sulphur and paint—to illustrate the importance of habituation, sensitization, and attention as conceptual categories for thinking about causation, change, and the archive in sensory history. These categories undergird the arguments of the book, but they also offer future historians a convincing way of confronting the problem of how to historicize ‘experience’. Language remains crucial to this project—naming, writing, and reading smells were experiences that framed and were framed by perceptual categories.

Air and Odour

Starting with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s experience of the Royal Institution lectures of 1802, this chapter sets out the relationship between smell, chemistry, and environmental medicine in the period from the 1660s to the 1820s. Putridity and putrefaction had long been associated with bad smell, but what the chemical investigations of the mid-eighteenth century succeeded in doing was separating the stink of putridity from its unhealthy qualities. Eudiometers, devices for measuring the quality of air that enjoyed a short vogue in the later eighteenth century, were one way of replacing the, now untrustworthy, sense of smell. Ultimately smell became a useful analogy for thinking about airborne disease or contagious particles, but by the early nineteenth century most physicians and chemists no longer believed that all smell was disease.

Talking Dirty

In the late eighteenth century, a prize was offered for a new vocabulary to scientifically describe smells. The challenge of describing smells was one which vexed several eighteenth-century writers. This chapter offers a survey of the shifting languages used to describe smells, using close readings alongside some quantification of vocabularies using digital databases. The shifting meanings of smell, odour, odoriferous, odorous, effluvia, perfume, aromatic, agreeable, and disagreeable, all demonstrate some crucial changes in the way scents were described across the eighteenth century. A shift towards more emotive vocabularies of smell and an adjectival intensification in the description of odours were connected to new consumer practices, discourses of politeness, and changing understandings of sensory acuity.

Conclusion

This conclusion restates and explains the broader arguments of the book. It argues for the importance of a new idea of ‘privacy in public’ which would go on to become a key part of the modern social imaginary, urban forms of governmentality, and sociable self-management. A number of changes are connected to this shift: a closer imbrication of the emotions and the senses; a more circumscribed idea of the body’s boundaries; a re-gendering of smell; a re-spatialization of odours; and a new focus on sensory idiosyncrasy. In many of these respects England was very different from France, on which influential work has already focused, during this period. The ideas in this book nuance recent visions of Britain’s modernity as a ‘society of [sensory] strangers’.

Metaphoric Odours

The association of smelling with intimate, instinctual, knowledge and the ascription of moral value meant that political and religious polemic made great use of attacks on bad odour or celebrations of the liberty to stink. Case studies of the Sacheverell affair and resistance to Walpolean corruption offer two examples of this. The smell of corruption could be found out by liberty-loving noses. But the liberty of citizens to make what smells they please and not have the government stick their noses in their business became a useful trope during the 1790s. Incense, on the other hand, became a handy metaphor for flattery, manners, and forms of gendered identity. Despite attacks on censing, sweet smells were still celebrated in the Protestant sensorium—as natural theological texts showed. Both political and religious invocations of scent testified to an increasing recognition of the subjectivity of smelling and worries about sensory privacy and publicity.

Smell on the Streets

This chapter sets out to offer a more complex picture of smell on the streets of eighteenth-century England than has been offered previously. Far from only being disgusted, urbanites engaged with the smells of putridity and mouldy food in subtle and complex ways that were freighted with questions of social status. This is apparent from domestic advice, jokes, and satirical prints. Yet sanitary records, parliamentary improvement acts, and occupational medicine all offer declining evidence for concerns about the health threats of smell. Despite this, the smells of trades, food, and the streetscapes continued have important social meanings for city-dwellers. A study of the dichotomized olfactory representation of London’s City and the West End demonstrates the continued cultural currency of unsanitary scents.

Tobacco’s Publics

In the coffee house the smell of tobacco created an intimate public, bound together by the common consumption of smoke, that excluded the nerves of women and sensitive fops who were said to abhor tobacco smoking’s scent. Yet the growth of new, mixed-sex, sociable spaces encouraged attacks on tobacco consumption as unmannered and unmanly. In its place rose snuff—a way of managing the idiosyncratic nerves without invading others’ atmospheres. Snuff had problems—it was dirty and noisy. But it worked well in a society in which increasing emphasis was based on managing the olfactory boundaries of the body and its circumambient space. The coffee house played witness to this shift: where once long tables covered in pipes had been surrounded by tobacco-smoking patrons, by the end of the eighteenth century men took snuff to protect their nerves against smells as they sat in their solitary, silent, boxes.

Individual Atmospheres

The eighteenth century witnessed a number of changes in attitudes to the making and wearing of perfume. Growing unease about perfume’s ability to disguise medical or social disabilities contributed to an attack on its artificiality. The use of strong perfumes was increasingly condemned—not because of their animal ingredients or a fear that they were unhealthy, but because they were an intrusive affront to codes of politeness and mitigated against the ability get along in increasingly anonymous, tightly packed, social spaces. A case study of the eighteenth century’s ultimate perfume addict—the Macaroni—and the pleasure gardens in which he roamed, demonstrates the degree to which perfumery could be construed as an atmospheric aggression against new codes of privacy in public.

Material Cultures of Scent

If tobacco was, normatively speaking, the preserve of masculinity then the smelling bottle was the visual symbol of olfactory femininity. Around 1700 the smelling bottle replaced an earlier object, the pomander, as the most popular form of material culture associated with smell. This shift illustrates several wider changes. The shift from the pomander to smelling bottle was a physiological shift from womb to nose; an embodied shift from leaky to stoppered-up visions of corporeality; and a practical shift from creating atmosphere to mitigating against atmospheres created by others. The design, use, and cultural representation of the smelling bottle all testified to these important shifts.

The Smell of Drugs

The new consensus that smells were tiny material effluvia emitted by all objects served to demystify odours and some of their former powers were questioned. Where sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers had believed that odours could be nutritious, by the early nineteenth century medical writers no longer believed this to be the case. In the world of materia medica doubts were also raised about the ability of odours to communicate medical powers and the capacity of smelling to divine the medical efficacy of materials. This was partly encouraged by a new medical marketplace in which, partly to render medicines palatable to all consumers, drugs were marketed as odourless. Smell was separated from medical efficacy. Yet the materiality and agentive nature of smells meant that their social power was rendered far more significant.